Life in progress

Outlook Spam?

Am I the only one who’s getting an influx of spam from Outlook e-mail accounts? About half of them are getting through the spam filter, and if I had to estimate, there have been sixty or seventy in the last couple of days. I don’t want to turn off the option to let people who aren’t WordPress users comment on my posts, but this is getting ridiculous. And they’ve started swearing–and threatening to touch me, too! Here’s the last message I sent to spam:

F*ckin’ amazing issues here. I am very happy to peer your article. Thanks so much and i am looking ahead to touch you. Will you kindly drop me a mail?

62 thoughts on “Outlook Spam?”

I don’t seem to be getting the spam, but I am beginning to wonder if I have been hacked. Just now I commented on another blog and decided to open the avatar to see what it says. It says I am a “Blogger” blogger–not a WordPress blogger! How can that be?

Matt, I finally figured out what was going on with my blog. I had the settings for automatic pay via credit card, but for some readon WP did not opt to use that. They installed a Jetpack, and changed the plan for an upgrade, but I had to agree. Go figure! Someone could have sent me a warning or even a general article to tell me I was part of a new upgrade and needed to say yes to their change.

Thank goodness I am not the only one. Mine all come in twos. Two emails from two addresses but on the same subject. A lot of them telling me how to recharge old batteries. More alarming is the constant advise on how to deal with toe fungus. I mean ….. how do they know this stuff about me?????

I’ve marked them all as spam and that seems to help the spam filters. However, I’ve seen a few bloggers allow these comments onto their posts without realising that the comment is spam. In all cases, the comments had bad grammar and did not appear under the notifications bell symbol on my blog. These spammers are getting cleverer and cleverer, so we’re going to have to keep our eyes peeled. If I’m not sure about any comment (and there is no image or photo on the Gravatar) then I always mark it as spam and then clear out my WordPress spam folder.

Here’s what I’m confused about. That little bell at the top of a WP page? I never see the spammers there. I see likes and follows that never show up there in my email. I don’t open them as the ids seem long and I just delete from there. If there was something to moderate it says so in the preview and I open them. I will start marking the emails as spam.

There is so much grammatically wrong with that! I hope that wasn’t written by a real human. If it was, that person should walk in front of the bus. On second thought, that’s rude of me to say and I’m realizing that if a person actually responds to that, then there’s a larger problem there.

It appears that they are utilizing the FOLLOW BLOG VIA EMAIL button? I had like 20 funky outlook accounts sign up since Monday. Even though I removed them, they were still able to do their doody work. I toggled the “Comment author must fill out name and e-mail” setting and so far so good. We’ll see what materializes with time…

Just got another one that I was asked to moderate/approve, on the same blog post as that the others. This is what they tend to say: “You really make it seem really easy with your presentation but I to find this matter to be really something that I think I would by no means understand. It kind of feels too complicated and very vast for me. I am having a look ahead in your next publish, I will try to get the grasp of it!”

No idea. As long as they’re not trying to sell something, the spam filter doesn’t pick them up. They’re just an annoyance. If you keep sending them to spam, the filter picks up on repeated phrases, which is why I think half of them do go automatically to spam.